`` I can remember vividly debates about the Phillips curve. And to this day I still have no idea how the concept has survived. We had high employment, high inflation and low real growth in 70s - followed by low unemployment, low inflation and high real growth in the 90s. No matter how much you "shift" or "augment" this flawed curve concept, it just doesn't work. The fact that the basic Phillips curve notion of trading off inflation for employment is now explicitly built into Fed policy decisions scares me to no end. There has always been a fat tail to higher inflation outcomes with Bernanke at the helm, but upon reflection, last week's 6.5/2.5 announcement probably made it A LOT fatter!''

Note how the "punchline" is that the best place to hide in is "real/hard assets", which of course are... stocks!!!

Now, we sympathize with the idea of earning inflation-adjusted yield in equities (and indeed, equities have for the last 40 years beaten more honest metrics of inflation, since the real increase in productivity has been "skimmed off the top", rather than paid out), but do you think you can really pick the right equities and win this game of roulette?

There's a reason gold has gone up every year for 12 years, more or less steadily (given the general volatility in the markets today): it's totally unloved, yet the best option to preserve "real/hard wealth".